Posts tagged Wyoming

Wyoming “In The Wings” EP

artisntreal:

WYOMING is the most recent incarnation of artist and Los Angeles native, Jacob Bercovici. Wyoming’s music lies somewhere between the more mellow moments of The Shins and The Eels with some Leonard Cohen underneath; an acoustic and solo approach with a full sound. Well-crafted and catchy melodies are common in this introspective project and Bercovici’s warm and benevolent voice here is an ideal carrier.

From a blog post about him last October.

Wyoming has released a new EP, In The Wings. If you’re reading via dashboard, you won’t see the Soundcloud embed I’ve put below:

Easily the best music I’ve heard this year from ANYBODY. I avoided it for days because I thought, “it’s some kind of cliche for me to listen to a band named Wyoming when I’m currently stuck there…” but it’s an enjoyable listen. It feels like it was made at home, but it doesn’t feel like it’s lacking much.

Don’t take my word for it, listen to it and see for yourself. Or wait until all of your favorite indie blogs are writing about it and then go “oh, that’s what he was talking about.” Except, you won’t do that.

I meant to post this on my own blog. But oh well…

BYU goes independent

After bantering about this earlier today on a college football blog, I thought I ought to chime in about this here.

One of the first football games I went to at the University of Wyoming was against Brigham Young University. The taunts hurled in their direction from the student section are not quite fit for a family publication.

In any case, the Cougars of BYU are leaving the friendly confines of the Mountain West Conference after this season, choosing instead to strike it on their own as an independent, opting instead for the West Coast Conference for all sports besides football.

This move is huge for the fledging WCC, which is made up of private religious schools that are similar in size. Having recently opted not to expand as recently as June, the conference changed its tune quickly when the possibility of BYU joining fell into their lap after the collapse of the Western Athletic Conference.

Most of the fallout seems to be that it doesn’t make any competitive sense for BYU to do this. Except, none of the realignment moves that have happened this year have absolutely anything to do with competitiveness. They have everything to do with money. College sports fans desperately want to believe in the purity of the game, because it makes them feel better when contrasted against the backdrop of holdouts, lockouts and performance enhancing drugs of the pro ranks.

This move makes a ton of sense for BYU in the short term. It’s unlikely the BCS Board of Directors will give BYU much in the way of concessions related to access to BCS bowl games beyond the standard “finish in the Top 14” that they had while in the Mountain West. But the school can schedule whoever it wants. They’ll have help, partnering with ESPN to broadcast their BYU-TV games and that will help tons to create some marquee matchups. Still, the BYU name doesn’t have the same cache as Notre Dame (even if BYU has been a lot better over the past decade) and it’ll be difficult to convert eyeballs west of the Mississippi.

Still, the Mountain West’s horrible TV deal was the sticking point here. It was hampering BYU’s own goals with marketing itself. Worst case scenario, the two parties kiss and make up within a decade in some kind of new conference realignment. Best case? BYU has great success and manages to position itself beyond what it could’ve done as a member of fledging leagues.

I’ve been hypercritical of the Mountain West leadership for being conservative during the quiet period. Boise State should’ve been invited years ago and they would have been smart to position that league well before Utah had a chance to bolt. But their missteps are coming back to haunt them now. The league will be a 10-team league next year, which is still one team more than they’ll have this season. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they found a way to expand to 12 teams before the dust settles.

No matter what, the league they’re inheriting isn’t as good as the one they are leaving behind. Meanwhile, the WAC will need a hail mary to ensure it’s own survival. I suspect UT-San Antonio will join the league and at least one other Texas school to prevent the defection of Louisiana Tech, but if Hawai’i decides it’s easier to be an independent too, they might have a difficult time scrambling to convince half a dozen FCS schools to move up in a few years, since many of them will need to add sports to qualify at that classification.

To really illustrate BYU’s quibble, the MWC television network (The Mtn.) is only available on extended packages via cable and DirectTV sports package. Meanwhile, BYU-TV is available on the basic tier of DirectTV, meaning I could conceivable follow BYU football anywhere, whereas the Mtn. would be an added expense.

I think this move is smart, proactive and low-risk because people aren’t looking at it with the right lenses. It’s all about the dollars and cents and long-term, it makes a lot of sense and cents for BYU to make this move.

We’ll see how it goes, I guess.

Some days, I just want to live someplace with cool folks who get it

I have days where I realize founding a tech startup where the sector isn’t quite developed (and by not quite developed I mean, non-existent) is perilous. I have very clear reasons for being here. Part of it is really about having cultivated a network and the fact that I’ve spent enough time here that I can see the potential for growth. Well and I’m something of a glutton for punishment too.

Upon leaving the Air Force, I had to transfer from Wash U because there was no way I could really afford to it.  I had two choices: A school that didn’t have a debate team and one that did. The latter school offered me a scholarship and was cheaper, but I chose the school that didn’t have a debate team. I did it because I thought building my own program would be more rewarding and I wasn’t sure if I could handle being in a faculty-led program after being in a student-led one to start college.

Now there is a happy ending in a sense. I did indeed start a debate program there. And said program went from 9 members at our first meeting to about 60 in two months. But a lot of that was timing and responding to the market (I added Model UN and Quiz Bowl to the group’s offerings, debate wasn’t that popular initially) and well, the group went on to be student org of the year for both years I was there, we debated Oxford University, I hosted a national tournament…

…but that’s not the point.

The point is, some days I just want to live somewhere with cool people who get it. It’s not really all that complicated. Not everyone has the money, the time or the know-how to branch themselves out in a market that suffers from a large bout of radio silence. That is, there are all sorts of amazingly cool things happening, but you have to leave here to participate in them.

You know hard it is to find an AJAX, Ruby or C# hacker in Wyoming? No, you don’t. But I’ll tell you. It’s not easy.  It’s not really so much about having to educate people about trends, because I’ve found that once you leave the (admittedly insular) tech sector, that lots of people struggle with trends and keeping up with what’s going on. Who can blame them? Folks have real jobs, families and other things that are far more interesting (or important) to them.

So I’m not complaining about that part. I actually enjoy the teaching and educating part most of the time. It’s really the lack of a critical mass that makes the startup environment in Wyoming so challenging.

When you’re dealing with the smallest population state, that’s one of the largest geographically, it presents a host of challenges. One of those is communication. Newspapers might be dying all over the country in print, but here they’ve got a vice grip on the conversation. Imagine a world where no one uses craigslist, where the Twitterverse might have fewer than 150 people statewide and save for walled garden social networks like Facebook or niche sites, there simply are no mass-market ways to get a message out to large parts of the stratified population.

While that’s a frustration, it’s also a challenge I relish. It’s not a problem endemic to Wyoming, as other rural areas suffer from the same problem. Difference here is, it’s an entire state and a lot of it has to do with culture and the mechanism of how things work and always have. Breaking through that is a delicate balance of political savvy and networking with folks “in the know.” And even then, you might lose.

It’s not just me, the interloping carpetbagger who chose to settle here who complains of this. I’ve got lots of friends who are frustrated with it too. Folks with generations of lineage here, some who have money, who can’t complain enough about how backwards certain things can be here and as a result,lots of them leave. (I once wrote an article about this…)

Don’t get me started on venture capital. Don’t let the tax haven status fool you. People come here to hide their money, not invest it. For that, head south to Boulder or head west to Utah. Or California, of course.

I was reluctant to write this post, because I don’t want to make it seem like it’s all bad. (Especially if I try to hire you in a few months…) It’s a great place to be, especially in the summer. And you have the opportunity to really make some nifty things happen in a place where no one would suspect it’d be possible, to be honest.

But illusions aside, this is truly the last frontier amongst the Lower 48 states for any sort of tech innovation. Now it’d be fine if you wanted to do work in energy or something, because you might get someone to listen to you. Maybe. But besides that? Forget it.

So that’s the uphill battle we face. The thing that gets me up everyday? I’ve met enough people, in enough places around the state that affirm what we’re doing. It’s not so much an issue of people not wanting to, it’s just a blind spot for those who control the purse strings and who dominate the conversations and the policy directions for startups in the state.

The people who are doing things need to realize they’re not alone. Luckily, there’s never been a better time to faciliate that, so that’s my task over the next few months. I doubt we’ll build Boulder in a day, much less Silicon Valley or anywhere else. It’ll never be that. But anything is a massive improvement over what we’ve got now.

In the meantime, there’s a reason I live between Laramie and Denver. You’ve got to stay connected to the pulse of what’s going on or you fall too far behind.